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%SELF REFERENTIAL BIASES 831002
What impersonal forces drive physicists to behave as
they do? How are they to make sense of their ownbehavior? They do not trust the in-exactitude of the non-
objective and humanistic observers of human behavior. They
are more comfortable with and feel greater confidence in
analyzing their ownbehavior in objective terms which
discount all feelings about the object of their analysis.
Physicists have traditionally sought to transcend
bias by treating the object of their analysis without
emotional considerations. The analysis of the biases of
one's closest associates tends to elicit emotional
responses, and so physicists have minimized emotional
complications by not including the history and philosophy
of science in their formal curriculum. Since their method
of understanding is ill-suited to self-understanding they
have contentedthemselves with objectiveunderstanding and
avoided the embarrassment of consideration of the
emotional foundations for their own choices, actions, and
aversions.
Specialists tend to respect the right of leaders in
each area of specialty to speak with authority about the
health and welfare of their own specialty. Each specialty
is regarded as a territory to be occupied and ruled by the
specialists in the territory. Invasion by members of
another specialty is taboo, and it is assumed that those
outside of a territory are unable to offer insight into
what is happening within a territory, so invitations for
visitations are rare.
The house of specialized cards becomes very unstable
when there are no specialists in perceiving the inter-
relationships among the specialties and their relationship
to the broader society which gives them support and
meaning. The biases of the specialties go unnoticed when
each specialist succeeds in believing that all bias has
been transcended by the choice of superior technicalprocedures and instrumentation. The insights of those who
have made poor choices of technicalprocedures and
instrumentation can readily be dismissed as foolishly
biased and unsophisticated.
Who can help physicists transcend the bias of their
objectivity?
(c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in
www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty
(On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)
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